Originally published Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008). Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press.

*

WHAT WE GET

by Katie Ford

I waited for a silence with its boards stripped off,

its sills pried away, all glasswork, all September light

with no latch. And when it came,

sometimes it was easy to think of nothing at all, have no question

at all, to sit and stare at the cracked, orange house next door

where the rodents scurried in and out, storing

green bulbs dropped from our trees—olive nuts, our choked-back eyes—

for the mild southern winter in which nothing dies,

only goes a way a while.

I wanted the far away. I wanted not to feel

caught. Look at the myrtle tree pulling up the yard.

Look at the belief I can’t live by, how it didn’t follow

but was here before me like the fields of tall, planted cane

this is what we get when we ask to be saved:

a land where everything grows, and there are many killings.

/

Originally published Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008).

Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press.

//

Katie Ford, born 1975 in Portland, Oregon, is visitingOslo Internasjonale Poesifestivalthis weekend. She is the author ofBlood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014), Colosseum (Graywolf, 2008), and Deposition (Graywolf Press, 2002). Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Levis Reading Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. / NWCC says thank you for the poems!